Hard Day's Night

First day's work for over a month now... I began my voluntary experience at Seva Mandir yesterday. I'll be working with Naveen who runs the Village Institutions programme, basically, as I understand it so far the programme concerns itself with empowering small village communities through democratic processes. Seva Mandir supports them in setting up elected committees who oversee a range of other projects. They encourage local villages to pool resources and work together to achieve higher goals, encourage education of all children with a special focus on increasing female participation (girls are so often not considered for education out here, especially in the countryside), set up institutions in each village to monitor health aspects such as childhood nutrition and midwifery and so on.. all of these revolving around the village committee.

It's been running formally for about 10 years now and seems to be up against some challenges, mainly down to the change affecting the day to day lives and power bases of those involved, I didn't see too much of that today but will hopefully learn more in the coming days. I was taken by Naveen about an hour outside of Udaipur (again by motorcycle, spent more time on one of those the last two days than standing on my own two feet!) to one of these village committee meetings. We arrived at eleven o'clock to a village empty of committee members. It was however full of inquisitive school children who had turned up to school to discover their teacher hadn't... I knew this happens a lot around the world but looking at the school kids face to face, all clean and wide eyed, some having walked five to eights kilometers to get in, I was pretty upset at the state of things... hard to describe the feeling, cliche but you could literally feel the potential seeping out of them there and then. Following this the committee members finally arrived, two and a half hours late for the meeting (though I am getting used to the Indian sense of time). Naveen wanted to get them up to date with their records (the duty of the committee) and so took them through the correct way to file them and some basic accountancy for the records of the various things the village produced. The meeting took about three of four hours, all in Hindi so I pretty much have no idea what else was discussed but I will hopefully be going through that with Naveen later today.

So that was my first day, first experience of an India NGO, very interesting and Naveen (a thick-set Indian with a lovely smile, incredible vocabulary and a love of Keates) seems keen to impart as much knowledge as possible so fingers crossed the rest will be as interesting!

(Footnote - While I have been writing this blog an Indian family, grandmother down to baby grandchild have been standing by the window gesturing to their mouths in the hope that I will give them some money to buy something to eat and I have ignored them and will most likely continue to.... not proud of that, but need to really... this place is definitely, to use a word that doesn't do it justice, a challenge.)

If, having read any of my posts, you would like to donate to Seva Mandir you can do so online at the following link: http://www.globalgiving.co.uk/pr/2000/proj1908b.html

Pick a project and follow the simple instructions, the money will be put to amazing use. :)